A Question of Responsibility
by DezoPenguin
Summary: Phantasy Star Zero. Though definitely idiosyncratic, Mayor Dairon is respected throughout the city that bears his name for his leadership and dedication. Which makes it all the more surprising to Ms. Lindow when he up and disappears. Does this really seem to be the caliber of work for the hunters who saved the world?
1. Chapter 1

He was the third generation of his family to be mayor over the city named for his grandfather, which if he thought about it long enough made his role more like a king or baron than a mayor. Dairon's grandfather had chosen "mayor," though, rather than any title of nobility, probably because he recognized that leadership wasn't an inherent right but just another job. His work as mayor was to coordinate the efforts of the people in building a better life for all, recapturing what had been lost to them in the Great Blank. Really, it was nothing more than expressing the shared will of the citizens.

It was this attitude that had earned Dairon the respect of his people. It was why he'd been able to rally them during Mother Trinity's robot attack, and get a party of hunters to go to the support of the newman resistance on the moon during the climactic battle. In his mid-forties, his hairline receding, the body beneath the salmon-colored coat starting to develop a paunch, he did not look all that impressive at first glance, but he had a certain force of personal charisma when face-to-face with someone, combined with his reputation built upon past successes.

Those factors were all part of why the ruins raider who'd just been dragged before Dairon was looking very nervous indeed.

Ruins raiding was a serious offense. The ancient technology from before the Great Blank was on some level considered the property of everyone. Merchants were allowed to make a profit on its retrieval—that was, after all, their compensation for the hard work they did in exploration—but such merchants were also screened and licensed so that they didn't just turn into looters who'd destroy objects of value or historical importance in their rush to get some quick cash. That didn't stop some people from doing exactly that, though, risking their necks in the name of greed.

This particular raider was like a caricature of his type: greasy, dirty, and ugly as sin, with a unibrow that made him look almost animal-like, and a torso covered in irregular patches of coarse black hair. The parts of his piebald chest not covered in fur were soft and pasty white, suggesting that it wasn't usual for him to run around outside without a shirt. The hunters escorting him had a feeling that shirt was currently snagged on the claws of some hostile.

Dairon leaned forward, palms flat on his desktop.

"Well, young fellow, it looks like you've got some explaining to do."

~X X X~

"This is fun! It's nice getting together with old friends on a job," Sarisa said. The perky redheaded newman had a big grin on her face as she and the other two hunters crossed the lobby from the Hunter's Guild counter to the mayor's office.

"Yeah, I've spent so much time training newbies lately that my hands are getting diaper rash," Kai quipped. He was a tall human, with dark olive skin, black hair in a ponytail, and a thin scar across the bridge of his nose. His trademark duster flapped around his legs as he walked.

"Still, I think that is important work," put in the third member of their group, the tall red-and-white CAST Ogi. "With the influx of new hunters lately, it is important that they come to understand the hunter's creed from an experienced and trusted superior."

"I feel like someone ought to toss in an 'or from you' at the end of that sentence to keep me from getting a swelled head," Kai laughed. "But yeah, there's definitely a lot of new recruits lately. I guess fighting off an invasion of robots from the moon, then defeating Mother Trinity and an evil god would kind of raise the group's profile."

"And a lot of Mother Trinity's former soldiers are joining up, too," Sarisa added. "It helps them experience first-hand the reality of this world, to help break down their indoctrination, and at the same time to use their skills to contribute and feel useful."

"Yeah, the last thing we want is those guys deciding to start a war on their own or something."

Any further ruminations were cut off as they reached the mayor's door, outside of which stood the red female CAST who served as his secretary.

"Ah, good morning."

"Hi, Ms. Lindow!" Sarisa said cheerily.

"A pleasure, as always," Ogi added.

"Thank you. I'm glad to see that you were able to answer my request, although I recall there being four of you in your group."

"Up on the moon with Reve," Kai said. "The newman government is trying to secure as many of Mother Trinity's former facilities as possible to prevent any catastrophic accidents."

"It would be extremely unpleasant if some sort of failsafe were to shut down power to the colony's life support, or unleash another army of security robots," Ogi agreed. The thought made Sarisa shiver—the moon, was, after all, her birthplace and its inhabitants her fellow newmans.

"I see." Ms. Lindow cupped her chin in a gesture that tended to mean she was thinking something over. "Well, that is unfortunate, but the situation is urgent and we must act quickly. Given how busy you all are these days, I should be grateful that as many as three were available."

"What's happening, Ms. Lindow?" Sarisa asked. "Your message only said that the city administration had a critically important job that needed trusted hunters to carry out."

"That is so, and I'm afraid that once again I'm going to have to insist on strict confidentiality."

"Darn, I hate nondisclosure agreements," Kai muttered. "Half the fun of being a hunter is sitting in the bar later and telling stories about the job." No one in particular was listening to him; Sarisa and Ogi were busy signing the proffered forms. Kai shrugged, then signed as well. There were usually good reasons for these requests, so he didn't mind it too much. "All right, so what's it all about?"

"We had better discuss this in private," Ms. Lindow remarked, and ushered the hunters into the mayor's office.

"It seems that his honor is running late today," Ogi remarked.

"Yeah, it's not like him to miss these mission briefings, if it's all that urgent."

"No, I will be giving the briefing," Ms. Lindow corrected. "The mayor's absence is the subject of the job."

"Wait, you mean he's _missing_?" Kai exclaimed. "What happened? Was he kidnapped, did he just run off, what is it?"

"That is the essence of our dilemma. I don't know; he didn't leave word with me of any intended absence, but there do not appear to be any signs of violence."

"Mayor Dairon is still an excellent fighter," Ogi observed. "It would not be easy to take him against his will."

"But where is he, then?" Sarisa asked. "I can't believe he'd just run off without telling anyone."

"He is getting up there in years. Maybe all the hits to the head he took in his hunting days added up, and he just kind of...wandered off?"

"Kai!" everyone chorused.

He held up his hands defensively.

"Hey, hey, I'm just tossing out ideas here, no offense intended."

"If we may re-focus into a somewhat more useful line of inquiry, are you aware of any clues to his whereabouts, Ms. Lindow?"

"Yes, thank you, Ogi. There is one thing that may be of significance. Yesterday, two hunters brought a captured ruins raider before Mayor Dairon for questioning. I was not present for the interview, but one of the hunters informed me that a very few minutes into the questioning, the mayor requested that the hunters leave so he could speak with the prisoner in private."

"That's pretty unusual," Kai acknowledged.

"Quite so. You will also notice here, the mayor's drinks sideboard." She walked over to the item of furniture noted. "One of my duties as his secretary is to keep the sideboard stocked. This is generally not difficult, as his honor usually only indulges in alcohol when he has a meeting which is more social than business. Upon discovering the mayor's absence, I noted that the brandy decanter had been exhausted, and that the level in the bottle was down as well." She opened the cupboard door beneath the sideboard to show the bottle. "I estimate that four glasses' worth of brandy were consumed in all, but only two tumblers had been used."

"So, you think the mayor and the ruins raider had a couple of drinks together?"

"Yes, Sarisa."

"But why?"

"I would speculate that the raider was able to provide Mayor Dairon with some rather important information," Ogi suggested.

"It's the only thing that makes sense," Kai agreed. "Either he dropped a hint or the mayor figured it out, and he sent the hunters out so word of whatever it was wouldn't get around."

"Then they sat down and had drinks together?" Sarisa was incredulous. "The mayor's policies are almost exactly opposite the kind of things ruins raiders do!"

"It is true that ruins raiders' greedy, self-centered attitude is the antithesis of the spirit of cooperation the mayor tries to foster among different groups. However, if the information possessed by this man was sufficiently important, it would be foolish to allow pride to take over. I believe the human expression is 'cutting off your nose to spite your face'?"

"Not quite, but close enough," Kai told him.

"So if that's what happened, then where's the mayor now?"

"If I may speculate further, Sarisa, if the mayor was given specific information as to something important enough that he would treat a criminal in such a friendly fashion, then he might have decided it needed to be pursued personally."

"You mean he had the raider take him to wherever he found...whatever it was?"

"That would be my supposition."

"Works for me," Kai said. He turned to their client and added, "You had a pretty good suspicion of that already, didn't you, Ms. Lindow?"

She nodded.

"I did indeed, but I wanted to see if your conclusion matched mine. A fresh perspective often makes sense before taking precipitous action."

"And chasing off after the mayor into a den full of hostiles is definitely pretty precipitous," Kai summed it up.

"But wait a minute!" Sarisa exclaimed. "That doesn't make sense."

Everyone turned to look at her.

"You can see a flaw in our logic?" Ogi asked curiously.

Sarisa nodded.

"I don't know quite what's going on, but even if whatever it was the raider had to say was so important that Mayor Dairon thought it demanded his immediate personal attention, he would still tell Ms. Lindow where and why he was going, wouldn't he?" She turned to the magenta CAST and continued, "You're his confidential secretary, after all. You even know about things the administration wants to keep quiet, like on that job you commissioned to retrieve Mags from Paru. I can't think that there'd be any kind of secret that he didn't trust you to hold in confidence, especially since he would know that going off on his own would leave a huge burden for you to deal with."

Kai, Ogi, and Ms. Lindow looked at one another.

"She's got a point," Kai said. "The old man can be a little spacey sometimes, but he wouldn't shut Ms. Lindow out."

"Indeed," Ogi noted. "In fact, the more significant the potential find, the _more_ likely it is he would tell her about it, so that proper follow-up activities could be commenced. For his honor to _not_ trust his trusted right hand on a critical matter would be quite out of character for him."

"Then what _happened_?" Sarisa asked. "What else explains the facts? I can't believe that he was taken by force."

"Yeah, and if he was there'd have been a ransom demand or something by now...oh." Kai glanced at Ogi. "Are you thinking what I am?"

Ogi nodded.

"That would explain all of the known facts."

Sarisa blinked.

"Wait, you don't mean...?"

"The situation is regrettable," Ms. Lindow concluded.

"And if that's true, then it's more important than ever we find the mayor, because he could be getting into the deep stuff without realizing it."

"That's true," Sarisa said. "Ms. Lindow, where was the ruins raider caught by the hunters?" _Please don't say the swamp_, she amended mentally.

"I believe that it was a newly discovered ruin adjacent to Gurhacia Valley."

"Oh, good; I'm fine with dragons." Sarisa breathed a sigh of relief.

"So c'mon, pardners, we'd better done be moseyin' on out."

Everyone looked at Ogi in shock.

"I apologize; it seems that particular glitch in my language filter is more persistant than I had believed."

It was well known that CASTs could not transmit data to other CASTs by means of wireless communication; that was the realm of significantly more powerful operations such as Mother Trinity's Photon Noise. Nevertheless, Ms. Lindow took one careful step back from Ogi, just in case.

~X X X~

_A/N: It definitely sounds unpleasant to my ear, but the game dialogue is pretty clear: the plural of "newman" is "newmans," not "newmen." *boggle* Similarly, "his honor" is never capitalized, despite "His Honor" being more properly correct, grammatically. Also, as I'm sure everyone noticed, I ducked the whole question of the player's character's race, class, and sex. After all, the whole point is for this story to be able to fit into everyone's game experience, not just in my own!_


	2. Chapter 2

Gurhacia Valley lay roughly halfway between Dairon City and Aroma City. The region was dry and dusty, with little rainfall, but a number of rivers flowed through the surrounding mountains and plunged in spectacular waterfalls to the base of the canyon. These sources of water kept the valley from being an arid wasteland, giving rise to patches of green amid the dusty flats. A number of free-standing mesas filled the valley, turning the base of the canyon into a mazework and adding a second level above: the mesa-tops were connected by a series of massive trestles built during the early exploration of the area. Unfortunately, a steady influx of hostiles from the mountains soon made the valley unsuitable for permanent settlement, but most people figured it wouldn't take much longer to reclaim, particularly with the immigrating newmens and awakening CASTs.

The early settlers had carried out a number of mining operations, but the mines were long abandoned, ore cars sitting disused and rusting. On at least one occasion, though, the miners had broken through into a previously existing area. There had been no time to explore it before...which, Kai supposed, was what left the door open for the ruins raiders and their kind.

"What was this place, does anyone know?"

It kind of reminded him of the Arca Plant on the moon, with its metal walls and artificial lighting systems. Obviously it had been built with technology from before the Great Blank; more surprisingly, it was still in working condition. The Arca Plant and other moon facilities had been maintained by Mother Trinity, but this place had been left untouched for two hundred years.

"It has not been explored as yet, so we don't have that information. We will, in fact, be only the second official party to examine this area."

"The second?"

"The hunters who discovered the ruins raider were the first, although they were forced to cut their mission short to take the raider into custody."

"So we could be seeing things nobody else has encountered..."

"You must be excited about this, Ogi," Sarisa put in.

"Absolutely. My only regret is that we have a specific mission to locate the mayor and therefore cannot linger in exploration."

"You really like these old ruins, huh?" Kai asked.

"Of course! The history of our society from before the Great Blank, the kind of lives we led, our missing heritage...Perhaps it is because as a CAST, my own existence stems from that period, and the missing memories we now know were erased by Photon Noise."

"So it's not just your heritage, but your own life history that you're rebuilding," Sarisa noted.

"I guess I can understand that," Kai said. "I mean, while I don't know anything more about the Great Blank than you do, at least I have my own memories." _Some of which it'd be a relief to forget._ "Still, I guess I'd just rather look forward than back. I want to know what helps us now, rather than revisit the past. Especially with what we've learned about Mother Trinity's origins and how what pushed her over the edge to be corrupted Dark Falz, I think that while we may have lost a lot from those days, at least we've learned to pull together and cooperate for everyone's good instead of always chasing our own selfish interests...What?"

Sarisa, Ogi, and Ms. Lindow were all staring at him.

"What?" he repeated.

"That was beautiful, Kai!"

"Geez, Sarisa..."

"Indeed, your high-minded sentiments are impressive."

"Do I detect an 'especially from you' in there, Ogi?"

"On the contrary, Kai," Ms. Lindow put in, "this is precisely the spirit of cooperation His Honor is trying to foster in the community."

"Aw, man, not you, too." _This is what I get for opening my mouth,_ he thought, while grateful that his skin tone didn't show a blush as readily as the pale-cheeked Sarisa.

"You shouldn't be embarrassed, Kai," the newman girl said, lightly touching his arm.

"Can we just get back to the job while I still have some dignity left?"

The entrance into the ruin had not actually been made into the facility's actual entrance. Rather, the miners had punched a hole through the wall of a large, open space. About nine feet down and three feet to the left was a metal catwalk surrounded by a waist-high guardrail, though, and with the aid of a few ropes it was possible to make a safe descent.

"This plant appears to have been some kind of manufacturing or refining facility," Ogi mused, peering over the edge of the catwalk. Far below on the ruin's floor were rows upon rows of cylindrical tanks in various sizes, connected by a twisted spider's web of piping, while a mazework of catwalks crossed and recrossed the huge room, allowing access to various valves, terminals, and the like. It all spoke of some powerful industrial force; even though Kai had no idea what any of it was actually _for_ he nonetheless was left with the impression of a slumbering giant, and he found that he wasn't all that eager to see what, if anything, would happen if he woke it up.

"Do you have any idea where we go from here, Ms. Lindow?" Ogi asked his fellow CAST.

"Only that the hunters reported that they captured the ruins raider in what they called the 'Central Block.'"

"We should have brought one of them along to give us directions," Kai mused.

"That would have been useful, but I did not want to reveal the mayor's disappearance to anyone whom I did not absolutely trust."

"Not to mention some of the...peripheral circumstances, hm?"

She sighed (or rather, being mechanical life not requiring respiration, expressed her emotions with such a sound).

"That also."

"Incoming hostiles!" Ogi suddenly shouted, cutting into the conversation.

"Stay behind us, Ms. Lindow," Kai advised, drawing his gunblade. The hostiles in question appeared to be security robots, different-looking but similar in principle to the Korses in the Arca Plant. These consisted of a large, flat, disk-like body from which a single bar descended, ending in a ball from which a weapon nozzle protruded. The ball rotated, offering a wide field of fire from almost any angle. Some of the hovering robots flew down from above, while others rose up from the depths of the room, weaving in among the pipes and catwalks.

"Don't let them get a bead on you!" Kai ordered, firing at the nearest hostile. The hovering robots, unlike the Korses, were capable of firing in multiple directions, not just forward-facing, and could fly in one direction while shooting in another. Multitasking hostiles definitely sucked.

Bursts of energy fire spat from the robots' turrets, sizzling through the air and on occasion, cutting holes in the guardrail and catwalk. The hunters fired back as best they could, with Ogi's rifle, Sarisa's techniques, and Kai's gunblade all effective at range, but their limited mobility hurt. A couple of the robots seemed to process this; they rose above the catwalk and commenced strafing runs down its length. Kai barely managed to use his Axeon's shotgun function to junk the two hostiles before their fire tracked right into Ms. Lindow.

"We're too exposed out here!" he exclaimed.

"Agreed," Ogi said. "There's a door in the wall that way." He pointed down the catwalk. "Go; I will cover our retreat."

Kai didn't argue; he grabbed Ms. Lindow's wrist and took off down the catwalk; his bootheels rattling off the metal flooring beneath them. Sarisa was right after them, while Ogi brought up the rear, spraying fire not in carefully aimed shots to destroy enemies but just trying to break up the robots' formations and keep them having to move and adjust targeting so they couldn't draw a bead.

The catwalk came to a Y-intersection; the right branch seemed to extend deeper into the snarl of metal, while the left went down a short flight of stairs, then headed right for the wall. Kai went that way, bypassing a couple of branches along the way to charge right for what did, indeed, look like a door—or at least a door _frame_, since the "door" itself was a blank metal plate with no knob or handle and no hinges.

"Damn, how do we open these things?" he muttered. Sarisa didn't hesitate, but slapped her palm against a red light in the wall; it turned green and the door slid upward into the frame. The hunters and their client didn't hesitate, but rushed through. Laser fire struck all around them, but the door slid back down, trapping the robots outside.

"Okay, can we not do that again?" Kai gasped, sucking in breath.

"Do you think the mayor encountered those things?" Sarisa asked.

"There was no mention of robotic hostiles in the hunters' report," Ms. Lindow provided. "Indeed, they encountered no hostiles at all, other than a couple of Vulkures which had apparently flown in from the valley and nested here."

"That would explain how the ruins raider got in here. Most of those guys aren't exactly tough fighters when it comes to taking on hostiles."

"I hope that the mayor is all right."

"Don't worry, Ms. Lindow. Mayor Dairon is a really good fighter. It'd take a lot more than a few robots to slow him down."

"Thank you, Sarisa." She gave the newman girl's hand that was offering her a comforting pat on the shoulder a quick squeeze.

Kai, meanwhile, took a look around. Their new surroundings were very different than the large industrial-plant area outside, being what seemed to be an ordinary corridor, around ten feet high and wide. The walls and floor were white, and light came form luminescent bars that ran along the corners where the roof and side walls met. Every ten feet or so, a segment of the lights pulsed an angry red, a danger sign if Kai had ever seen one.

"Perhaps something the raider did, or is doing, triggered an alarm," Ogi suggested. "The robots would have been deployed in response to that, and thus not encountered on their initial visit."

"That makes sense."

"We had better keep an eye out, as there may be more robots in this area, although likely of a different type."

"Why of a different type?" Sarisa asked.

"Confined spaces like this corridor would restrict the usefulness of a high-mobility, lightly-armed weapon. Their primary advantages would be negated. An armored type with heavier firepower would be more appropriate to use in this area."

"Well, let's just hope this area isn't typical enough that whomever built the place felt the need for added security."

They continued down the hall, which ended in another door similar to the one they'd entered by. The difference was that this one had a label next to its red-lit panel.

"'Elevator W6 to the Central Block,'" Kai read. "Well, the hunters caught the ruins raider in the 'Central Block,' so this sounds promising." He pressed the panel. This time, there was a slight delay before the light changed to green and the door opened. "By the way, what's an elevator?"

The others all looked at him with slight incredulousness in their expressions (even Ogi managing to pull it off somehow despite his lack of a mobile "face").

"What? I wasn't born on the moon or before the Great Blank, so I have to learn this stuff the hard way."

"I suppose it must be similar to when I first came here and had to see human cities for the first time, or how it was when the CASTs first woke up," Sarisa said.

"An elevator is a small room which rises and descends mechanically between different floors."

"Oh, so it's like a teleporter, but the room actually moves you around physically. Given the size of this place, I can see why people wouldn't want to be going up and down stairs all day long."

They stepped into the elevator car, the door closed, and they descended rapidly, Kai's stomach lurching with the sudden jolt of movement. There was no telling how far they went, but if his estimate of their speed was correct, it was at least a hundred feet, below the level of the floor of the cavernous outer area. At last, the elevator stopped moving and the door opened again.

"E-eep! This doesn't look good!"

Sarisa was right; it didn't look good. The hall looked similar to the one above, but here in the "Central Block" the entire length of the light bars was red, flooding the hallway with bloody radiance.

"Is it supposed to be like this?" he asked. "I can't imagine people working with the light this way."

"It's probably to signal some kind of security alert," Ogi said. "We should be extremely cautious."

They moved out warily, the three hunters keeping Ms. Lindow behind them. The elevator seemed set in a side wall of a corridor rather than the end of a hall like on the upper level, so they had to pick a direction. It was Sarisa who ended up making the selection, pointing to something down the hall to the right.

"Hey, is that a data terminal?" she asked, indicating a panel set into the wall. "Maybe you can find out something from it, Ogi."

"Yes, that is a good idea." He approached the recessed panel and examined the interface. "Hm, it appears that this is more of a message display and communications device than a means of accessing the plant's computers. A ready way for the staff to check on status reports and the like."

"Any of those messages useful?" Kai asked. He and Sarisa were keeping an eye out in either direction while Ogi accessed the terminal.

"As a matter of fact, yes. The current status report reads, 'Warning: Gicefalque outbreak in the Central Block. Biosystems Containment Level C initiated; Protect Bits deployed in External Plant.'"

"Those must have been the hostiles we fought. Protect Bits, huh? Didn't do so much of a job protecting us."

"It says that all staff members are to keep their ID badges on their person at all times when entering the External Plant. I would surmise that the Protect Bits are programmed to treat those not carrying such badges as intruders."

"This 'outbreak' referred to must have taken place recently," Ms. Lindow deduced. "That, in turn, set off alarms and released the hostiles. I wonder, however, whether it was the raider, the hunters, or the Mayor who caused it?"

"I am more concerned with the nature of the outbreak," Ogi noted. "It is not an encouraging word. And I am not familiar with the word 'Gicefalque'; it may be some kind of toxin or disease, or—"

"Or a kind of hostile?"

"Certainly that is a possibility, particularly if the Protect Bits are meant to assist in containing them."

"Then I think we've got our answer," Kai told him, then pointed down the hall, where three indigo-blue creatures were advancing towards them on spindly legs.


	3. Chapter 3

The hostiles scuttling towards them looked nothing like anything Kai had ever seen. Most of the creatures he'd fought as a hunter—the Dark Falz-spawned entities in the Dark Shrine a significant exception—looked more or less like _something_ from nature. That made all the more sense when he considered their origin: easier for Mother Trinity to twist animals into violent monsters than to start from scratch. It wasn't too different than how newmans had apparently been created somehow from humans. The _method_ was way beyond his understanding, but the _concept_ made sense.

These things were different.

The central mass of the creatures was a round ball about the size of a human torso. It had no eyes, nose, or other features besides a mouth flanked by insectlike pincers. There were only two limbs, one on each side of the ball, thin and agile and ending in a clawed foot like a bird's. They scuttled forward with phenomenal speed, closing the distance rapidly.

Ogi was the first of the hunters to react. Perhaps as a CAST his mind was less susceptible to being stunned by surprise, or maybe it was just his personality, but in any event he whipped up his Garland and fired. His first shot thudded into the orb-like body of one of the Gicefalques, which seemed to be enough for them to recognize the gun as a threat and begin zigzagging, even to the point that they'd scurry up the walls like insects, their talons biting into the cool white surface. Ogi's second and third shots missed entirely, the hostiles moving too fast, too close for him to get a bead on them.

Then the creatures were upon them.

The Gicefalques suddenly sprang at them, pushing off whatever surface they happened to be standing on with surprisingly powerful thrusts of their spindly legs. It was like a nightmare, being assaulted by these monstrosities in the red-lit haze of the emergency lights, and Kai barely got his gunblade around in time to block the leap of one of the hostiles. Even as he pushed its body away, its talons were reaching for him, slashing at his body, and light flashed as they were turned back by the defensive fields of his Photon frame. The damage was reduced to a few nasty scratches on the outer layer of his duster, but could have been a lot worse.

Next to him, Sarisa had done the same thing Kai had, blocking the leaping Gicefalque with her weapon. The book-like Emerald Tablet stopped its jump, but the thing's weight was too much for her and the impact knocked her sprawling back at Ms. Lindow's feet. Fortunately, the hostile had been coming at her off the wall, so it hit as a slight cross-angle so that it did not fall directly on top of her but off to her right. Ogi reacted at once, whipping his foot up into the thing's body and literally punting it back about six feet down the corridor.

Kai's opponent got its legs under it almost at once when he knocked it away, and it rotated its body backwards, the legs apparently mounted with highly flexible ball-and-socket joints. This brought its mouth up towards him, and suddenly a spray of thin filaments shot out. They struck his torso and stuck there, clinging like spiderwebs, and suddenly an electrical jolt surged through Kai, stunning him. He tried to swing his gunblade, but his muscles wouldn't answer him.

The third 'falque, meanwhile, had sprung up to the wall, then leaped down onto Ogi's blind side while he was helping Sarisa. Its talons carved savage gouges in his front and back plates, while its mandibles slashed at his shoulder joint. Roaring in anger, or maybe desperation, he reached across his body with his left hand since his right—and the rifle—were pinned by the hostile's bulk. Ogi got a grip on the thing just above his mid-leg joint and hauled it off by main force, using the leg as a handle while twisting his shoulder forward for extra leverage. The thing hit the floor with a sound like a sackful of something wet, as if its interior had no rigid bone structure at all.

Ogi didn't hesitate; he whipped his right foot around and slammed it down on the 'falque's other leg, and the snap of bone was audible. The hostile made no sound, but thrashed wildly to try and break free. The CAST's weight held it pinned, though, and he brought the gun around and fired into its body from less than a foot away. Olive-green ichor burst from the wounds, and the thing sagged, inert.

Kai's heart was in his throat as he watched the hostile he was fighting leap towards him, but suddenly he felt a warmth wash over him, and thanks to Sarisa's Anti technique his body was his own again. His gunblade came up to interrupt the leap, the Axeon's four points impaling the leaping 'falque with its own momentum. He thrust forward, driving the thing against the wall and forcing the blades in even deeper with a disgusting squelching sound, making sure the thing was very dead.

That left just the third one. It sprayed its shocking filaments at the fallen Sarisa, but luckily she avoided the stunning effect. Fighting off the pain of the shock, she used Foie and blasted the hostile with a massive ball of fire that jolted it back again. A second Foie followed, as did gunfire from Ogi and Kai, and the last 'falque dropped.

Kai let out a deep sigh.

"Okay, I'm officially against letting those things break out anywhere."

"Indeed, they could pose a significant threat in large numbers," Ogi agreed, as Sarisa was seeing to his injuries with Resta.

"I worry about his honor's safety," Ms. Lindow said, a trace of agitation in her voice. "If there are significant numbers of them, he could be in grave danger, particularly because he does not have a team of allies to support each other as you did."

"You're right. We'd better get moving."

They proceeded down the corridor, going deeper into the Central Block. The door at the end of the hall led to a laboratory-like area, with banks of computers along one side, displays showing a variety of charts and graphs that were way over Kai's head. The other side of the room was transparent, made of the kind of not-glass substance used for windows on the moon.

Ordinarily, they might have lingered to examine the machines, but it was clear that the mayor, or at least someone, had come this way: the bodies of two Gicefalques marked their passage. One had had its limbs severed and body punctured, the other looked more like its body-sac had been torn open by a blade; the olive-green ichor that seemed to serve the things for blood was spattered everywhere.

"Looks like the old man's still got it," Kai said, unable to resist a grin. While the evidence of battle was a reminder of the threats they faced, it provided proof that Mayor Dairon wasn't easy prey—that their search wasn't a lost cause.

"Ogi, do you think any of these computers can access a security layout or other map of the area?" Ms. Lindow suggested. "I know that we want to press on, but it might help our search."

"I shall try."

He walked over to the machine and quickly began manipulating the touchscreen interface.

"That is intriguing," he mused.

"What?"

"This place is called the Biosystems Laboratory. It was originally involved in the tailor-making of species via manipulation of their existing genome, to create creatures to fill a particular environmental niche."

"Uh, you want to say that again in a language that someone actually understands?"

Ogi gave Kai a look.

"That would be difficult, seeing as I don't actually know what a genome is, myself. You may recall, however, that this exactly matches with the description of how Mother Trinity created the newman race, giving them their unique physiological characteristics."

"Okay, so this place was for what, designing the animal equivalent of the newmans?"

"That seems very likely."

"Why?" he asked bluntly.

"As I said, to fill a particular environmental niche. As you may recall, Mother Trinity's original purpose was to repair the damage which human and CAST society had inflicted upon the earth's environment. One symptom of that damage was mass extinctions, which in turn led to other issues in the food chain developing: for example, if a predatory species dies out, then what it feeds upon can grow unchecked and that, in turn, would exhaust its food source and so on and so forth."

"So Mother Trinity planned to restore environmental balance by replacing the dead or dying species with new ones adopted to their environment?" Sarisa asked.

"I believe that to be essentially correct."

"And when that didn't work out," Kai completed, "and she went off her nut, then that's when she tweaked the...genome?...a little more, and started cranking out hostiles. Which means that this is the place where she was originally making those monsters!"

"Yes—or, more accurately, one of the places, as similar facilities apparently existed in a variety of locations globally."

"So what about those Gicefalque things?" Kai nudged a fallen hostile with his toe. "They aren't exactly your average hostile."

Ogi nodded, then turned back to the computer. The screen flashed twice, a new message popped up, and he shook his head.

"Access to the information on the Gicefalque from this terminal is protected by a passcode, linked to authorized access only."

"Can't you get around that somehow?"

Ogi gave him a look.

"Kai, we are barely capable of operating computers and other advanced technology from the past. In order to bypass security, we would have to actually understand how they work, which is another matter altogether."

"Blast. But still, I suppose it doesn't really matter when you come right down to it. The things were being made here, however that works, and now they're running around. We just have to find the mayor and not get killed while doing it. Speaking of which, did you find that map?"

"I'm afraid not. It may be present, but the system is much more complex than anything I have yet to deal with. Sarisa?"

The newman shook her head.

"I'm sorry; we didn't have computers like this on the moon. I think it's because Mother Trinity managed things herself, and didn't want us to be able to learn too much about her and the past. It's one of the things Ana and the new government are having to wrestle with, keeping the technology running that makes the colony habitable, while we're still learning how it functions. I'm sorry that I can't help."

"It is nothing to be ashamed of. You cannot be expected to do what you have never been taught."

"I know, but I still would rather be able to do it and be useful."

"Hey, I thought you'd gotten over that inferiority complex of yours?" Kai teased, making her blush. "It's not like we have pre-set maps on a normal job. We'll just have to do this the ordinary way, right? Besides," he added, poking the tip of his gunblade at one of the fallen 'falques, "it looks like his honor left us a trail of bread crumbs to follow."

They left the room by the far door and headed out into the next corridor, where indeed several more of the hostiles lay fallen, and they began to search through the ruin. It always seemed to Kai that the ancients made their facilities needlessly complex, with maze-like room layouts and corridors that seemed more like chokepoints to slow up intruders than sensible architecture. Of course, that might just be that he didn't understand how places like the Biosystems Plant had been used, but when time and time again it happened he couldn't help but to start thinking it was a conscious choice by the people back then to make their buildings labyrinthine rather than efficient.

That may or may not have been true, but what was definitely true was that he was rapidly getting tired of Gicefalques. Several times they found evidence of the mayor's previous battles with the things, but just as often they were reminded that there were plenty of live ones. Their agility and their stunning filaments made them especially dangerous, as did their unnatural biology which required him to learn a whole new sequence of movement patterns. Once, one had been clinging to the wall above the door and jumped down on his head as he walked through; only Ogi's quick action in getting it off him had saved him from having his throat torn open, with Sarisa's Resta keeping his injuries from being anything worse than a couple of scratched. He doubted, though, that he'd ever walk through a door with quite the same confidence again.

It was encounters like that, though, which gave Kai even more respect for the lethality of the hostiles, and perhaps that was one reason why he noticed something else in the room, a stain of a different hue than the spilled ichor of the slain 'falques.

Blood.

It wasn't enough to indicate a lethal injury, but human blood was human blood. Someone, the mayor or his guide, had been hurt here, and that could mean a lot of things. Things that Kai didn't like thinking about.

He didn't know if any of the others had noticed it; at the least, none of them seemed to be taking any particular note, although it was hard to tell with the CASTs. After a few moments' thought, he decided to keep the discovery to himself. It wasn't particularly useful, not like a trail leading in a particular direction would have been, and would just worry and depress the others. Sarisa, especially, would be vulnerable to that kind of thing. Maybe Ms. Lindow as well, given her close relationship to the mayor at work. Her being a CAST didn't mean that she couldn't feel things like worry and grief, he was certain.

Then the moment to speak up passed, because the next room drove all thoughts of it out of Kai's mind.

"What _is_ this place?" Sarisa marveled.

The room was seemingly huge, at least a hundred feet square, and dominated by large, cylindrical tanks, lined up in two staggered rows on either side of the room. Each tank had a metal base and top, the latter connected to the ceiling by several feed tubes and cables, the cables in turn connecting to a webwork of pulsing greenish-blue light that suggested the flow of energy. The walls of the tank were made of the same transparent stuff as the windows earlier, so that the hunters could see inside. Each tank was filled with a viscous green fluid, and in each floated...something. Kai assumed they were hostiles, but couldn't be completely sure since he'd never seen anything like them before.

The things' newness reminded him of the Gicefalques, but that was all they shared. These were much larger, for one thing, as tall as a person, roughly round or dome-like in shape, covered in armor-like plates but for a single eye and two vent-like apertures on either side of the body, each sealed with liplike folds. A nest of tentacles covered the thing's lower side, probably used for locomotion. That was something like and octopus, but there were dozens of the appendages and they were much shorter. The entire impression Kai got was that this was something unnatural. If these things really were hostiles created by Mother Trinity, then she'd _definitely_ stopped tinkering with ordinary animals and started looking elsewhere for inspiration. Creatures spawned from wherever Dark Falz came from were the only things Kai could even imagine suggesting something like these monsters.

If the tanks really were generating or sustaining the creatures' lives, then a couple of them looked to have failed over the past two hundred years: the fluid was a sickly yellow color and the hostile inside each shriveled and twisted, almost like they had starved to death. Despite the fact that Kai certainly had no positive feelings for the monsters, he found the sight of these even more unnerving than the "normal" ones in the working tanks.

But the tank that disquieted him most of all was the one near the far door which contained no fluid, no monster alive or dead—and from which a section had slid upwards like an opening door. _Maybe_ that meant that no monster had ever been inside it, that it was standing empty, waiting for use for all these decades. Maybe.

He severely doubted that explanation.

Especially when they heard a high-pitched, squealing scream from behind the far door.


	4. Chapter 4

The hunters didn't hesitate. The cry had been one of pain, of fear.

It had been human.

They burst through the door at the far end of the room and into one that was even larger, this one roughly octagonal in shape, but the "facet" at the back left side was dominated by a giant machine, flashing a variety of multi-colored lights and surrounded by little floating panels of light that displayed images, words, and figures like the screen of a data terminal.

Standing in front of the machine, his sword drawn and dripping ichor, was Mayor Dairon! Three 'falques scuttled around him, wary of his blade.

"No, stop it, you fool! Get back here while you still can!"

The object of his shout was a second man, short and wiry, who was sprinting towards the door, weaving his way between the strange apparata that covered the floor, dodging around computers and horizontally-mounted cylinders with tables protruding from the ends, and other equipment that Kai couldn't begin to imagine the purpose of. The place was absolutely alive with Gicefalques, though; at least two dozen scuttled over and among the equipment.

It was easy for the hunters to see all this because the door had opened up not onto the floor level but on a kind of gantry that was halfway up the room, with wire-mesh flooring like the catwalks broken up at the sides of the room by transparent platforms where more terminals could be found. They could see that the running man was bleeding from a claw-swipe in his side, that another 'falque was scuttling up over a table to leap towards him.

Reacting quickly, Ogi whipped up his Garland and fired. Two shots thudded into the thing's body, the third missing, doing little significant damage but jolting it enough to spoil its attempt to jump. A second later, a blast of fire from Sarisa's Foie technique hit it, knocking it back off the table and sending it scuttling away wreathed in flames.

By then, Kai was already on the move, running for the stairs that led down to the floor level. He rushed down the first eight steps to where the staircase turned at a small landing, and rather than run the rest of the way he grabbed the railing and vaulted up and over, dropping to the tiled surface. He flexed his knees as he landed, helping to absorb the shock, and was off running in an instant. Another Gicefalque scuttled around a kind of angled table with touchscreens and display panels, heading right towards the running man, but Kai whipped his gunblade down one-handed, striking the thing where its left leg joined the body, severing the limb. While the hostile flopped around on the ground, Kai shot out his arm, his free hand grabbing a fistful of the other man's shirt.

"_Whoa!_" the hunter shouted. "You want to get yourself killed?"

"I'm not staying here! I'm not letting those things get me!" the terrified man squealed.

"Then calm down and let us clear them out!"

His eyes were wild and rolling.

"There's no end to them! They'll keep coming and coming!"

"There's more of them out _there_, too!" Kai snapped. He was aware of Sarisa and Ogi making their way towards him, pausing every few steps to fire or to use a technique at a target of opportunity. "Not to mention a bunch of robots designed to keep _these_ things in _here_. You don't stand a chance alone!"

"But...but..."

"We came here to rescue you and the mayor both, and that's what we'll do." Okay, it was stretching the truth slightly, but "rescue" had become part of the mission expectations as soon as they'd found the first hostiles, and while they might have come for Dairon, Kai wasn't going to leave anyone else behind. Not even a ruins raider—and as this guy went, he was as unprepossessing as they came, with tufted dark hair, a thick unibrow like a black bar across his forehead, fuzz-speckled cheeks, and a weird tuft of bristly hair on the right side of his neck above his collar.

"He's telling the truth," Ogi said as the others caught up. "There is safety in numbers, particularly in a place like this."

The ruins raider sucked in air, fighting down his panic, but Kai could see it was a close thing. The man was near to the breaking point, and if he snapped again he probably wouldn't regain his senses until he reached the fresh air.

"We'd best quickly get to the mayor," Ogi added, probably seeing the same thing as Kai, even as Sarisa used Resta on the man's injuries.

"You'll get no argument from me," Kai agreed, firing his gunblade towards a flicker of movement.

They had to cut down a half-dozen more 'falques on the way, but they forced the point, driving back to the corner where Dairon was holding off another pair of attackers.

"Mayor Dairon! I am glad to see that you are safe, sir," Ms. Lindow greeted him. Close up, Kai could see that the mayor was basically intact, though rips in his jacket and a hole torn out of the left thigh of his trousers suggested that he'd had more than a few difficult encounters along the way. Since attacks stopped outright by Photon armor wouldn't damage clothing, Kai assumed that he'd been hurt more than once and had had to resort to Resta or monomates to keep himself going.

"Ms. Lindow!" he gasped, actually flinching in surprise. "What are you doing here? And you others as well? Not that I'm not glad to see you, but it's quite the shock."

"You know us hero types," Kai joked. "Always making a grand entrance just in the nick of time."

He wasn't sure quite how Ogi managed to roll his eyes when they did not, in fact, have any pupils to roll, but he pulled it off somehow.

"Well, it was definitely a timely arrival; I can't deny that things are getting a bit dicey."

"What I don't get is, where are they all coming from? I mean, if you'd known there were hostiles everywhere, you'd have brought hunters along to clear the area."

"Take a look over there." Dairon's voice was grim as he pointed a thick finger towards the other back corner of the room. The view wasn't clear, not like it would have been from the landing, but Kai could still see about half of what Dairon was pointing at. It was one of the monsters from the cylinders in the previous room, probably what was once inside the open one. It looked even more loathsome in the flesh, the tentacles writhing beneath it like it was sitting on a living nest. Like the Gicefalques, it was the sheer alienness of the thing that was the worst part, the sensation that this was not something that naturally existed, but purely a creation of Mother Trinity's twisted hatred for humanity.

But that wasn't the worst part.

Even as Kai watched in shock and horror, the mouthlike part on the thing's side twitched, and the lips opened, pushed aside by the bulbous sphere that forced its way out, followed by two twitching legs.

"My...what is that? Some kind of queen? Are the Gicefalques its larvae?"

The newly "born" 'falque pushed itself upright, seemed to shake itself, and then scuttled off into the room with no less apparent mobility than its fellows.

"It's been spitting out a new one every five minutes since we got to this room," Dairon said.

"Every _five minutes_?"

"About that, yes."

"But that's a dozen an hour. And if the thing started spawning Gicefalques when this guy did whatever he did to set them off—"

"H-hey, I didn't know!" the raider protested immediately. "I just touched this thing, and it lit up like a fireworks display! And then these weird green beams came out of that other thing over there." He pointed to another machine. "I didn't know about any monsters!"

"That's why you're not supposed to go creeping around ruins," Kai told him. "You never know what you might stumble into."

"And without a proper exploration team," Ogi added, "the risk of accidental damage is very high. Even if they were to stumble across a problem, a regular, approved group of explorers would report back to the city—or be missed if they failed to report—and hunters could be sent to deal with any problems before they got too far out of hand. Your rogue excursions have no safety net, and so can create trouble for everyone."

"You think I haven't been punished for it? Look at this!" He tugged at the patch of hair on his neck. "Everywhere those beams hit me, these patches of hair started growing! I look like a freak, like I've got spots all over me!"

Sarisa made a face, imagining it.

"Ew," she summed up.

"Just desserts, if you ask me," said Kai.

"I fail to understand the significance," Ogi noted, "as one human body hair pattern looks much the same as another to me, but it does suggest that we were correct in our surmise."

"Quite," Ms. Lindow said, a sharp edge to her voice. "I can only conclude that the purpose of this excursion, Mayor, is to find a way for you to regrow your thinning hair."

Dairon flushed.

"That's...this technology could be of benefit to everyone! A machine that promotes cellular regeneration! Just think of the medical applications!"

"Why should we?" Kai muttered. "You only thought of it just now."

"If this was an expedition in search of medical technology, then it would be unnecessary for you to come here in person, sir," the secretary was remorseless. "The proper procedure would have been to dispatch an exploration team, possibly with a hunter escort. Instead, you chose to come in person, without expert assistance to examine the machine, without any additional help, and in secret, leaving only chaos in your wake from your absence. These facts point to the illicit purpose of your expedition, which can be summarized only by the realization that this equipment cannot be transported back to the city. Thus, not content to merely pose an irritant to others by experimenting with noxious chemicals, you have instead begun to risk your own safety in this shortsighted quest of yours, while leaving me in a position where I was unable to explain your whereabouts during the functions of city government in your absence!"

"Why...I...that is..." Dairon stammered. Kai took pity on the man.

"Give it up, Mayor," he advised. "Don't try to explain, just grovel."

"In addition," Ogi noted, observing the computer, "you are in error about the function of the machine in question. According to this data, it does not promote cellular regeneration. Rather, it is designed to alter the genome of exposed cells. It is apparently supposed to be for use on embryos, a means of using Photon-based transfiguration to shortcut the genetic tailoring process."

"Um...what does that mean?"

"I have no data on that, Kai."

The hunter facepalmed.

"You may recall, however, that we encountered similar terminology when we learned about the creation of the newman race from Ana? Most likely, this facility was involved in similar operations."

"Maybe in altering animals to create hostiles?"

"Very likely so."

Kai nodded.

"Mayor, remember what I was saying about groveling?"

"Yes..."

"Never mind. I'd go straight to flowers. Maybe give Ms. Lindow a month's vacation while you're at it."

Another Gicefalque pounced towards Sarisa, but she blasted it with a Foie to drop its charred corpse to the hex-tiled floor.

"Can we focus on getting out of here first, before we make plans for later?" she exclaimed. It will be noted, Kai thought, that the Force did have a temper when pushed too hard.

"She's right," he said. "We can yell at the old man when we get back to the city."

"Why not just telepipe away?" Ogi suggested.

Kai pulled one of the emergency teleportation devices from his pocket and used it. Or, at least, he tried to.

"Nothing! It's not working!"

"The security alert must be establishing some kind of anti-teleportation field," Ms. Lindow suggested.

"That is very likely the case, to prevent any accidental escapes into the wild," Ogi agreed.

"Then we do it the hard way. Which means we have to kill that queen Gicefalque thing so we're not picking hostiles out of our teeth the whole way. Heck, if we clear all the little ones from this place, maybe the robots will shut down on their own, too."

Ogi's fingers flew over the computer's interface panels, accessing more data.

"Ah, here we are. The 'queen' is called a Guilgenova; it is designed to continually produce Gicefalques in order to threaten and occupy an area. Apparently, they were designed to be deployed as a weapon of war."

"Another one of Mother Trinity's little extermination projects, no doubt."

"Actually, no. The information here appears to entirely be the construct of human scientists. Mother Trinity did not create these particular hostiles."

That raised some interesting thoughts in Kai's mind, but he shoved them aside for the moment.

"Anything there on how we kill it?"

"The Guilgenova is heavily armored against gunfire, according to this data. Blades would work better, but test data suggests that lightning and fire were the most effective forms of attack."

Kai looked over at Sarisa.

"Okay, it looks like it's the two of us, then. Here's the plan: Sarisa and I will charge in close enough to use Earth Bullet and Foie on the queen. Mayor, can I count on you to escort us in and help me fend off the Gicefalques?"

Dairon nodded firmly.

"Of course."

"Glad to have you. Ogi, give us covering fire, but it's also your job to keep any stray hostiles that don't go running back to protect the queen off Ms. Lindow and this guy." He jerked a thumb at the ruins raider.

"Jovo!" the man protested. "I got a name, y'know."

"Ms. Lindow, if you wouldn't mind, would you make sure Jovo, here, doesn't wuss out again and try running away?"

The raider's eyes widened. "Wuss out? What the heck is that supposed to mean?" Which was more or less what Kai had hoped for, since anger was one of the better defenses against panic.

"I shall endeavor to keep matters under control."

"Good." Kai pivoted back towards the Guilgenova, watched the myriad of scuttling...larvae? Soldiers? He didn't know quite what insect comparison to apply. It didn't matter, anyway. The word that best applied from _his_ point of view was _obstacles_. He took a deep breath. "Then, let's go!"

Shouting defiantly, they charged directly into the swarming hostiles.


	5. Chapter 5

A ferocious battle cry was one of the ways hunters would seize the psychological edge in combat. It revved up the one shouting, and against some enemies could even be disconcerting, emphasizing the shouting one's valor and aggressiveness.

The down side was, it kind of tended to draw attention to oneself.

In truth, Kai had no idea if Gicefalques could hear. They had no discernable ears, or for that matter eyes, a nose, or any other kind of sensory organs, so for all he knew they functioned by some weird kind of psychic radar. But it certainly _seemed_ like they could hear, because as soon as he, Dairon, and Sarisa began their charge it was as if every hostile in the room was drawn to them like a magnet.

They came at the hunters from all sides, leaping and swarming viciously. Kai and the mayor both struck out, slashing or puncturing the first attackers. They'd gotten some experience, now, in fighting the hostiles and had a better idea of their weak spots then when they'd first encountered them. That served them well at first, but soon the hostiles were coming in twos and threes, slashing and cutting. The stunning filaments, too, were in play, and with multiple attackers it was harder to dodge them. Dairon was actually hit by a paralyzing attack and only a timely cure from Sarisa let him shake off the effects in time to skewer another 'falque springing at his head.

It was hard, though, to strike a lethal blow while fighting defensively. Kai and Dairon did what they could to hold them off, but they were taking hits, too, claw-slashes across the back or to the legs. The real problem was that their formation was broken, their advance towards the Guilgenova stalled. Dairon, Kai, and Sarisa were forced away from one another by the onrushing hostiles, like a Reyhound pack deliberately culling a member from a herd. Kai grunted in pain as a 'falque clawed him; he slammed his gunblade down hard on the one in front of him, smashing it twitching to the floor, but was nearly hamstrung as he exposed his back. Only a quick shot from Ogi jarred the hostile enough that its claws raked the side of Kai's leg instead of tearing open the back of his knee.

_Too many_, he thought, whipping his blade in an arc to try and clear space. _There's just too many._ A good five or six had clustered around himself and the mayor, while Sarisa seemed to have drawn twice that number. _Going after the small and weak,_ he thought. The Force was actually the most dangerous of them all, with her techniques, but physically speaking she wasn't imposing, and seeing her try to fend for herself against the swarming 'falques brought back memories of other deaths, other friends lost.

Kai winced as another slash across his side, this one getting through to his ribs, reminded him of why he wasn't able to rush to her rescue. He felt the wetness of blood even as he pivoted sharply to fling the hostile into another, the stab of pain as injured muscles were taxed by the movement. But he couldn't tear his attention fully away from the beleaguered newman. She wasn't moving—had she been stunned by the hostiles' electric attack? Two leaped for her; one went down when Ogi shot it, while Kai fired at the second, not having a chance to see if he'd done anything before he was brought down by the weight of two 'falques seizing the opportunity made by the gap in his defenses.

"Yaaaah!"

It was Sarisa who screamed, but not in pain or in terror. It was pure, defiant rage, and it was accompanied by a brilliant flash of light that stung at Kai's eyes. Lightning speared out from her in all directions, chaining from one Gicefalque to the next in a fury of electrically-aspected Photon more reminiscent of Reve than it was of Sarisa. _She's been studying,_ Kai thought numbly as every hostile in range was blown apart by the Razonde, their orb-like bodies popping almost like balloons.

Balloons filled with greenish ichor that sprayed everywhere around themselves.

"Ewwwww!" wailed Sarisa. "This is worse than that octopus's slime! This was my favorite robe and I'm going to have to _burn_ it now!"

Kai groaned, pushing himself upright. He'd gotten a fair number of splatters on his own clothes as well, but he liked it a lot better than he did the alternatives. Then again, Sarisa looked like she'd taken a bath in the stuff, so he could sympathize. Especially given the smell, which was no worse than a rotting Grindle carcass drenched in spoiled cheese and seasoned over a sulfur pit.

"That was an impressive technique, young lady," Dairon said. The mayor looked to have fended off his enemies better than Kai had, mostly seeming uninjured. Kai used a Resta on himself to patch up the worst of his own wounds before he took any serious blood loss.

"Thank you. Reve's been working with me on my Zonde techniques."

"I think I'll let you be the one to congratulate him on the job he's doing," Kai said. "If he finds out he was responsible for you being able to save all our backsides he'll be insufferable for a week."

He swiveled towards the Guilgenova. Stripped of its escort, it no longer looked vicious and threatening, but almost forlorn. The hunters stalked it methodically; it tried to retreat, but its tentacles couldn't move it much faster than a walk. Sarisa's Foie technique and Kai's Earth Bullet Photon Art set it alight, and then Ogi and Kai chipped in with gunfire as the fire chewed away at it. The thing gave off a weird hissing noise like escaping air as its body collapsed in on itself, rapidly dissolving into goop, its structure obviously unstable and dependent on the Photon reactions that allowed it to produce 'falques to keep it intact.

As the body dissolved, the red light that had been illuminating the Central Block since the group's arrival went out and normal white light came on. Apparently security sensors like the ones that operated the hostile containment gates existed in this facility.

Kai let out his breath with a deep sigh.

"I'm so happy that's over. Let's get out of here and get back home."

"You said it," Sarisa agreed. "I think I'm going to be washing until next week before this stink is going to get out!"

"I would like to talk to you later, Mayor, about arranging a proper expedition here. I believe there may be much to learn."

"Hey, what about me?" Jovo spoke up.

"I presume that the mayor promised you your freedom in exchange for your services as his guide?" Ms. Lindow said darkly. Dairon did not meet her eyes.

"Um, that is..."

"I thought so. Nonetheless, a deal is a deal, and it is not your fault that his honor's actions were irresponsible."

"Plus, all those hostiles were a little more than he bargained for, I figure," Kai noted. The grin he gave Jovo was returned with a sour look, but the raider was bright enough to notice when he was ahead and kept his mouth shut. "Good, with that settled, let's get back home before anything else happens."

He was just fishing for a telepipe when the alarms went off.

"I believe there is a human expression about 'famous last words,' Kai?"

"Cute, Ogi."

"But what's going on now?" Jovo howled.

"According to this," Ms. Lindow announced, looking at the computer, "upon detecting the death of the Guilgenova, automatic deployment of an additional unit is being initiated."

"Wait, so it's going to just keep churning out those things?"

"The room we entered from! Quick, we have to stop it before it starts spawning," Kai exclaimed, and suited actions to words. He charged to the staircase, raced up it, and through the door, the rest of the party on his heels. What they found was just about what they expected: lights were flashing on the metal cap of one of the tubes, and the green fluid was steadily draining from around the Guilgenova inside.

"Whatever Jovo did when he activated the machines must have created a loop where the hostiles continue to be deployed," Ogi concluded.

"I didn't know anything like this could happen!"

"Which is why you don't go _touching_ stuff when you don't know what it does!" Kai snapped. The scruffy little man flinched at the whipcrack voice.

"Does this mean we're going to have to kill _all_ of them?" Sarisa moaned.

"It's worse than that," Kai told her. He pointed at the sign on the door reading, "Bioexperiment Incubation Chamber 1."

"If this is Chamber 1, then this facility must also contain a Chamber 2, and possibly a 3, 4, 5, and so on," Ogi followed his logic. "Chambers that could release hostiles without us having any idea where they are, so who knows how many more might spawn?"

"We have to shut down the feedback loop!" Sarisa exclaimed.

"How?" Kai asked. "None of us can operate these computers; you heard what Ogi said before."

"If we cannot stop it with a software-based solution, then we shall have to implement a hardware-based one," the CAST Ranger concluded. He turned on his heel and marched out the door back onto the catwalk, raised his Garland, and fired three quick shots from the compact rifle.

They were stopped cold by a shimmering green field.

"A Photon barrier!" Sarisa said. "It must be security to keep the computer core protected."

In the next moment there was a dull humming and a section of the floor below slid open. Three figures began to rise up, carried on an elevator platform, massive humanoid robots nine feet tall and four or five across with brilliant gold plating and flanges at the joints that made them look more threatening and spiky than they had to be. They lacked any kind of "head" structure, unlike a CAST, and a single large lens like a cannon barrel was mounted in the center of their chests.

"Okay, things officially just got worse," Kai groaned. These things had all the indication of being about as friendly as an Arkzein.

"ENOUGH!"

That someone should roar in frustration and anger in a situation like this wasn't unusual. In fact, fury at the constant stream of bad breaks was a pretty rational response, all things considered. What had Kai, and everyone else, standing there with sagging jaws despite the situation was that it was _Ms. Lindow_ who had said it.

She pushed past the crowd, who stepped aside wordlessly. The intensity of her cry, and the way her every movement seemed to radiate a rigidly controlled and focused determination made everyone give way to her lead.

Well, the gigantic Photon cannon she was suddenly carrying might have had something to do with that, too.

Where it had come from wasn't immediately obvious; some kind of Photon transference technology seemed the only answer. Kai was fairly sure that he'd have noticed the CAST secretary lugging around a twelve-foot-long cannon colored a brilliant white, the barrel so ridiculously outsized that it had a built-in bipod to support its weight.

She swung the cannon around, resting the barrel on the catwalk, pointing directly at the three robots. She squeezed a button on the side, and a crackling, pulsing ball of energy began to take shape at the cannon's tip, swelling with every passing second. Little pulses of blue-green light surged up and down the length of the Tartaros Cannon, stray energy cast off by the building of the gun's Photon Art. The hulking robots began to stir as their platform fixed into position; the ball of gathered Photon was nearly as big as one of them by this point.

Then Ms. Lindow fired.

The blast from the cannon obliterated the three robots. The left and right ones went toppling sideways, large chunks of their bodies suddenly erased. The center one simply ceased to be. The Divine Ray shot on, crashing into the computer core. The Photon barrier held for half a second, then shattered. There wasn't enough power left in the attack to utterly destroy the computer, but the crushed, sparking wreckage left behind did not appear likely to continue as a threat.

Being experienced hunters, Kai, Ogi, and Sarisa didn't stand staring at the aftermath...well, not for more than ten seconds or so...but turned back to the room with the encased Guilgenovas. The fluid was no longer draining from the active cylinder, and the hostile floating half in, half out of the green material seemed completely inert.

"Well, that worked," Kai observed. The red light had gone out again, this time replaced by amber, probably from the lesser emergency of the computer's destruction.

"Can we go home now?" Sarisa asked plaintively. "It's bad enough that there aren't any decontamination showers on the earth; I think this stench is trying to kill me."

"Come to think of it," Dairon murmured, "it might be a good idea to keep a sample for analysis. The chemical properties of 'Ichorslime Y' might prove to be a great boon to—"

"You will proceed directly to the bathhouse upon return to the city, where you will surrender your clothing to me for disposal. I refuse to tolerate any further complaints about the smell of noxious chemicals in the administrative offices! Sir," Ms. Lindow amended.

As has been noted, Dairon was a respected leader known for making wise decisions. He once again displayed that quality.

"Yes, ma'am."

And on that note, Kai's telepipe whisked them home.

~X X X~

"Hey, Sarisa!"

"Oh, hi, Kai!" The newman girl was sipping from a cup of something purplish she'd picked up at a street stall. It had been several months since her arrival on earth, but human society still held a fascination for her. She loved to wander the streets and by-ways, soaking in the bustling atmosphere. "How are you?"

"Fine, you?"

She wrinkled her nose.

"I think I can still smell that ichor, even though it's been nearly a week. But it might just be a hallucination brought on by post-traumatic stress."

Kai leaned over and sniffed at her hair.

"Nope, it's not a hallucination."

She blushed furiously.

"Kidding, kidding!"

"Kai!" She punched him playfully (mostly) on the arm, grinning.

"Oh, yeah, speaking of that, did you see the latest Guild listings? Looks like the mayor and Ogi got the details worked out, because there's a job to escort an expedition team through the Bio-Plant."

They walked along together, the afternoon sun warm on their faces.

"Are you planning to go along?"

Kai rubbed the back of his head.

"Well, it's not really my kind of thing. I'll help out if Ogi asks, but otherwise I'll be glad to have seen the last of that place. And with the main computer shut down, I think Ogi and a team of mid-grade hunters can do the job against any active security robots. And if it gets to be too much, he can always call in Ms. Lindow."

Sarisa laughed.

"That really surprised me! I never knew she could fight."

"I don't think she did, either. Ogi said something about the combat programming being a routine from her body's sub-memory, triggered by her emotional state."

"So her frustration and anger allowed her to tap into additional strength."

"Yep, just like any other woman—ow!"

"Just agreeing with your point, Kai," Sarisa laughed.

Kai rubbed his arm. "Now I know how his honor feels."

The newman giggled, then fell quiet as a somber expression settled over her face.

"What is it?" Kai asked.

"It's the things we learned at the Bio-Plant."

"Like what?"

"The hostiles we fought, the Guilgenova and Gicefalques. Ogi said that they were created by people, not Mother Trinity, as a bioweapon. That means, for warfare, for fighting other people, they created something like that." She shuddered. "Mother Trinity—she tried to destroy all of civilization with the pollution, the Photon Eraser, the hostiles, but even she never turned those monsters loose on the planet."

"And?" he prompted, though he had a pretty good idea where she was going.

"I think...it's because her hostiles were still, basically, natural creatures. They could still fill a niche in the environment. The Gicefalques are completely unnatural, and the way that they spawn...one Guilgenova could produce over a hundred thousand 'falques in a year, monsters designed to do nothing but kill!"

Kai nodded.

"I think I get it."

She turned wide eyes up at him.

"Kai, Mother Trinity was insane, and possessed by Dark Falz besides, and even she wouldn't use those things. The people at the Bio-Plant, they did something _worse_ than Mother Trinity did!"

Kai raised an eyebrow.

"Feeling sorry for her again?"

"Yeah, kind of. I mean, if that's what people were like back then, then..."

He let out a sigh.

"I guess I can sort of see it too. Ogi says that's one reason it's so important to study the past, so we can see the mistakes we once made and not be such numbnuts again."

Sarisa chuckled.

"Ogi did _not_ say 'numbnuts'!"

"No, but it made you smile, and that was the important part." He put his hand on her shoulder, giving it a quick squeeze. "It's like I said before. We may have lost a lot in terms of technology and science and history in the Great Blank, but I think what we've learned since then is a lot more valuable. You ask me, I like living in a world where wide-eyed optimists like you are right about people more often than not. That's something those people who ran the Bio-Plant never had in their lives, you can bet!"

Sarisa's smile widened.

"Yes. Yes, you're right, Kai!" She beamed at him. "You can see it all around us, just like I did when I first came to this city. That's what I want to protect by working alongside everyone as a hunter."

He smiled back.

"Sounds like you're about ready to take on another job."

And they turned their steps towards the white-and-blue tower of the city's administration building once again.

~X X X~

_A/N: There, now I can say I've written at least one fic for every Phantasy Star game that I've played! ^_^ Of course, old-school PS players would recognize many of the shout-outs to PSIV that I included, since the Guilgenovas and Gicefalques are monsters from the Bio-Plant, and the three golden security robots are the bosses from the "Silver Soldier" quest where Chaz & co. have to try to shut down the computer, Daughter. (They're about as effective there as they are against Ms. Lindow.)_

_Kai's remarks on the state of humanity are kind of pithy...even cheesy, but at the same time they represent what has to be the biggest shift between PSOnline and PSZero (it probably won't spoil anyone who read this far when I say that late in Zero's quests the characters learn that their "earth" is actually Coral, the homeworld of the _Pioneer_ expeditions in Online). Online is a depressing game where legendary heroes die; multiple government forces (administration, Lab, military) are jockeying for power, none of whom have the well-being of the citizenry in mind; and hideous bio-experiments are taking place...and it only gets worse in the sequel, Episode III. Basically, it comes as absolutely no shock to learn that the human governments on Coral would engage in the kind of petty bickering and counterproductive power-brokering that caused Mother Trinity to fall into despair and be possessed by Dark Falz, visiting an apocalypse upon the planet._

_But Zero is a weirdly optimistic game. It's all about three races of people coming together, joining as one, and kicking evil's backside. Multiple times, if necessary. Even the government is made up of good people trying their hardest, and the mayor's worst vice is a tendency to use government resources to try to follow up on strange rumors of a baldness cure. It's an optimistic setting to the point of naivete, except that the naïve triumph over the cynical and jaded every time. And while I adore Online, seeing Zero get a happy ending (heck, even the obligatory scene where a PS party member sacrifices their life...turns out fine!) is actually pretty darned refreshing after the dystopian grind!_


End file.
